Mobscope

by Carlo Longino [Mobyhappy.com]

Following Russell’s earlier post about stats on mobile web usage, this story caught my eye yesterday:

AFP – Text messaging still king in mobile phone world

Text messaging remains the most dominant mode of mobile data communication, as high costs and cumbersome procedures keep customers from fully embracing fancier applications, industry players say.

As revenue from voice service narrows, mobile operators are hard pressed to find a key new application that will continue generating cash like the simple yet still popular short messaging system (SMS), also known as text messaging.

There’s not much else in the story, really, which focuses on efforts to add features to SMS like sound effects — an attempt to ride a popular service as far as possible by adding superfluous extras to it, instead of removing the roadblocks to innovation elsewhere in the ecosystem. Check out that first sentence again:

“Text messaging remains the most dominant mode of mobile data communication, as high costs and cumbersome procedures keep customers from fully embracing fancier applications, industry players say. ”

There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. If only we could find it…